Yoruba

The Yoruba people of West Africa are one of the continent's largest sub-Saharan ethnic groups. They are admired the world over for their refined arts and for their religion of Ifa. The commerce in captured Africans, which tragically continued for centuries, made the them the most influential African group in the New World. It is an influence of culture, religion, and spirit that is still present, still celebrated.

Ife bronze head in the British Museum

Proto Yoruba

"To be absolutely thorough, Yoruba history begins with the appearance, around 10,000 BC, of a Negroid people in the present middle belt and north of Nigeria.

Some scientist claim that prior to this, there were some human beings in some parts of northern Nigeria. If this is true they were however Bushmanoids, not Negroids, and are now found only in southern Africa. It would then imply the new race displace then, for they disappear around the time the Proto Yoruba emerge. The Yoruba Race is therefore the oldest race extant in Nigeria."

Ayoade Oluwaseun Olubunmi, The Rise and Fall of the Yoruba Race - 10000 BC-1960 AD

There are various myths about the beginning of Yoruba culture on the continent of Africa. Novelist and folklorist, Harold Courlander says in his book Tales of Yoruba Gods and Heroes,"The Yoruba people,...occupy the southwestern corner of Nigeria...

Portugese explorers "discovered" the Yoruba cities and kingdoms in the fifteenth century, but it is believed that such cities as Ife and Benin, among others, may have been standing at their present sites at least four or five hundred years before the European arrival. And archeological evidence indicates that a technologically and artistically advanced people--possibly proto-Yorubas--were living somewhat north of the Niger in the first millennium BC. Sophisticated terra-cotta art found at Nok, about three hundred miles north of Ife, has a stylistic relationship with later Yoruba art. The Nok terra-cotta was made about 300 BC, and the Nok people were then already working iron."

Fundamentals

Voodoo a distant relative of the Orisa veneration practiced by the Yoruba, has suffered the negative images of Hollywood movies and the problem of being misrepresented, ridiculed and made into a joke. Many office voodoo kits, voodoo cards and game, misrepresent and defame what is still a vibrant spiritual tradition of the indigenous people of Dahomey.

Chief FAMA in her book "Fundamentals of the Yoruba Religion (Orisa Worship), "Though Yoruba religion ws preserved in the West, its chants, songs, dances, rhythmic drum beats, prayers, and riutals were slightly changed, modified and were even lost due to cultur suppression."

Demographics

Yoruba are the major group in the Nigerian states of Osun, Oyo, Ogun, Ondo, Lagos and Ekiti.